Rapeseed - Green Fields to Gold

Winter’s flown.  The weather’s warmed.  Days of drizzle and sun thoughtlessly intermingle. The fertile German countryside flickers from brown to green to eye-catching gold. You whisk along the autobahn, or navigate a winding hilltop road and spy great swaths of color spread like yellow silk scarves on green velvet.

In decades past, you’d think of mustard.  But, now it’s rapeseed, mustard’s cousin, that catches your eye in field after golden field.  You only have to glimpse the magnificence of endless squares of bright yellow to understand why I chose to forego my usual preoccupations with wine, women, and fifty-dollar lunches to scribble about cooking oil.

Cooking oil, in the form of rapeseed (rapsöl in German), is a huge cash crop, not only in Germany, but across the globe. Back in the 1950’s only a few thousand tons were produced, but now the number has raced into the millions of tons.  Germany ranks about number five.  Why do I say ‘about number five” instead of just number-flipping-five?  Because, like college football rankings, commodity rankings vary according to whose poll you’re idly reading, over your second cup of coffee.  You don’t look at commodity polls? You ignorant serf!  Anyway, China is so far out in front, it really doesn’t matter who the top ten are, except to say the U.S. ain’t one of them.

But you do find rapeseed oil in abundance in every American super market, marketed under the name Canola Oil.

Why the sudden rise of rapeseed production. Lots of reasons, the biggest being that scientists figured out a way to grow rapeseed low in erucic acid, which incidentally is mildly toxic to humans, in addition to being hard to pronounce and impossible to remember.  There’s another thing that makes German rapeseed oil different.  The European Union has strict agricultural rules, including the banning of genetically modified crops.

With elimination of the erucic acid problem, rapeseed moved out of the “good for soap and lamp oil” category and into the universally celebrated, heath conscious “high in omega 6 and 3” spotlight.  The crop’s popularity suddenly blossomed (so to speak), with new uses found every day.  Besides cooking oil, the stalky rapeseed plant provides a high protein animal feed and even bio-diesel fuel.

So, the next time you slide the top back, put that cute thing (and by cute thing, I mean anyone with breasts who doesn’t bark) on the seat beside you, and race along a winding hilltop road toward that fifty-dollar lunch, gaze across the rolling countryside.  See those patches of gold?  Just like your cute thing, those golden fields, rapturously swaying in the gentle breeze, are not just beautiful to look at, but really, really useful in a variety of ways.